Avoiding the New Year's Resolution Fail and Keeping your Employees Happy

by Startacus Admin

The New Year generally brings with it a plethora of fitness videos, healthy eating regimes and gym subscriptions. Whilst adhering to them is admittedly a personal thing, employers have their part to play too. Hannah Sims from employee benefits provider Perkbox outlines some tips to outline how you can avoid the New Year's Resolution ‘fail’ and how employers can use New Year’s resolutions to keep a returning workforce happy.

Only 8% of people achieve their New Year’s resolutions. Here are some tips to help you be in that annoying minority.

With the New Year comes a flood of fitness videos, healthy eating services and gym subscriptions. And as if the last New Year resolution fails never happened, the whole world looks to seize the opportunity of a new calendar year to become healthier, fitter, skinnier, more positive versions of our former selves.

What we don’t realise is that each and every one of those gym and healthy food companies know two things:

1. First, the inherent desire within us to become the best versions of ourselves (realistic or otherwise)

2. And the second: the very short window of opportunity in which they can sell to us motivated people before we (probably) go on to fail spectacularly, losing all resolution motivation and eating, drinking and smoking even more just to comfort ourselves.
   

The January Blues: the effect of the New Year resolution fail

OK, let’s get straight to the point: New Year Resolution success rates are in a bit of a mess, with just 8% of goals achieved come the year end. Now that’s depressing. For the 92% of us who make up the united resolution fail army, the psychological effects of failure serve as a cruel reminder that we are simply incapable of achieving what we set out to achieve. When this unhappy and demotivated fail army make up your workforce, you, as an employer, can be faced with a serious downturn in productivity.

Yet all of the above can be avoided if everyone sticks to one (very simple) New Year’s resolution rule: to be truly realistic when setting goals.

Happy, smiley people: Hitting those (realistic) goals

If you’ve ever been addicted to a game of scrunched up paper aiming for a waste bin goal, then you’ll realise just how great it is to succeed, even at something as small as this. And this highlights one pretty fascinating fact about resolutions: that no matter the size of the target, hitting it feels great. It’s very tempting come the 1st of Jan, when you feel like a Christmas pudding and your body is 99% alcohol, to promise to make BIG changes in 2016: to NEVER face the mammoth fuzzy head again but rather to join those people who are up before 6am pounding the pavements in their Hi-Viz. But don’t fall into the trap. Remind yourself that the real changes will come about with the SMALLEST of goals that are planned to perfection.

It's competition time

By encouraging your employees to set their own realistic (and small) targets, and by doing it in a way that captures their imagination and helps them track their progress, you, as an employer, can play a vital part in helping to set your workforce up for success.

Why not create a competition? Ask your employees to write down three realistic goals each for January 2016 and set up a star chart on the office wall using laminated photos of each employee’s face. This means a big laugh at everyone else’s mugshots every morning but it also serves as a way of tracking their progress. Once they’ve achieved their realistic January goals, they can ramp it up for February…and tick those success boxes, one step at a time.

Calling all HR departments and company directors: Let’s talk business

The New Year also makes for a pretty awesome time for reflecting upon your business’s performance in 2015, and setting some professional goals for 2016.

When setting professional targets for your employees the same golden rule about realism applies; you should introduce a little motivation with the promise of personal rewards should they meet their monthly goal. This may be something as simple as a free lunch, spanning over a no doubt much lusted-after 2-hour break.

You could also set up a employee reviews calendar each month. These serve as an opportunity for goal assessment as well as considering what else you may be able to do as a HR department or business owner to help that particular employee in fulfilling their professional and personal goals.

3 Fresh ideas for resolutions that you can stick to

If your team is struggling for inspiration, how about these three fresh and fun New Year’s resolution ideas?

1. The non-overwhelming ‘get (a little) fitter’ resolution

Encourage your employees to go to the gym together! Start with one class or workout a week and see if you can recruit new members every time. You could even start a pre-work yoga session in a meeting room! Sneaky.

2. The ‘give up giving up: eat (a little) more healthily’ resolution

A ‘Come Dine with Me’ style long lunch once a week, where workers are in competition to create the best lunch that is under 500 calories, can work wonders for team bonding and healthy-eating motivation. You could also put up a ‘lunch-spiration’ board on the kitchen wall and update it on a weekly basis with at least three healthy, quick and easy lunch ideas.

3. The cheesy but realistic ‘confidence boosting be happier’ resolution

A weekly, compliment box is awesome for boosting employee happiness and confidence. Get each member of staff to write down a compliment for a fellow employee and hand them out on a Monday morning. This can be done anonymously or signed by the generous author. There’s no better way to start the week than by knowing that Sarah from sales thinks you’ve got the best smile in the office.”

Perkbox are delivering happy, smiley employees to companies up and down the country. Through a perfect package of over 100 happiness inducing rewards we ensure that workers are truly feeling the love when it comes to employee appreciation. And of course their bosses’ businesses are also feeling the happy vibe through a savvy investment that transforms a team’s potential from untapped to positively unleashed.

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• #work life
• #employee
• #benefits
• #new years resolutions
• #mindset

Published on: 30th December 2015